On 07/06/2018 07:40 PM, ntrfug wrote:
On Fri, 6 Jul 2018 15:47:37 -0500 Richard Owlett <rowlett@cloud85.net> wrote:In response to a unrelated post to a LUG, I was asked if I had a separate /home directory. Short answer -- no. I abandoned WinXP when Jessie had become stable. The installer defaults {I assume for cause} to putting every thing on one partition/directory. Where may I read about pros/cons ? TIAThe home directory contains not only "personal data" but configuration directories for all your apps. I long ago settled on a middle-of-the-road solution--I have a partition mounted on /home/ntrfug/files which contains all my "data" such as email, photos, documents, non-distribution software, bank statements, etc. I've been doing this for ~20 years and I still like it. I can reinstall nuking the home directory to take advantage of updated configurations but still keep my word processing documents, email, and general umm, stuff.
New here. But not new to Linux. Been using Linux for a over 5 years as my main OS (and a good many years before that as dual-boot).
I too have went to a different solution than having a separate /home directory.
I used to have a separate /home directory back in the day. But I realized that anytime I wanted to reinstall or redo my system (upgrade major version seems to work better on a fresh install on my systems), I would have problems with some apps due to old and outdated configurations in my /home directory. So every time I went to do a (re)install, I ended up wiping the /home directory anyway (after backing up my data which I never had much of).
Now that I use laptops, I NEVER keep a lot of personal data on my hard drive. I keep only a few things needed daily or for work. But when I have done everything I need to for the day, I back up the data redundantly off the hard drive. This has come in handy numerous times when my main laptop died out or something went wrong where it was down for awhile. I just load the data onto the other laptop. That other one I don't keep any data on it since data changes and it would be a PITA to go lug it out and update that one as well with my personal data. USB sticks for data is easier to carry from one machine to another. I also keep an encrypted copy of my backups on the cloud at the same time I update my regular off-computer backups.
This means that I don't have to worry about data loss in case of theft, or hardware failure, and I can use any machine I need to. And if I upgrade or update, I don't have to worry about old configuration file formats needing to be overwritten or conflicting with newer versions of the programs.
I really don't have a lot of data either. My /home directory is only me and only around 66 GB. The majority of that is configuration files though. My actual personal data is around 2GB total.
In addition, I've written a python script to auto-install all my data so putting everything back on doesn't take long or much effort.
Frequent backups ensure I'll always have my data no matter what. And so this kinda removed my need for a separate /home directory.